How to Boost Profitability with Brewery Management Software

Every dollar counts when you’re in the brewery business. Brewery management software lets you work smarter, not harder, so you can brew more and manage less.

Keep reading to learn all about brewery management systems and how to use them to improve your business’ profitability.

What is brewery management software?

Brewery management software is designed to help brewery operators optimize inventory, sales and production to save time, money, and hassle. Also known as a brewery ERP (enterprise resource planning system), this specialized solution comes with all of the features and tools you need to run your business, such as:

• Inventory management: Prevent stockouts and waste
• Recipe costing: Easily calculate cost of goods sold to price beers profitably
• Production planning and tracking: Optimize your production capacity
• Sales management: Store customer data and identify opportunities 
• Distribution management: Spend less time driving kegs
• Advanced reporting: Reach the right business decisions faster
• Accounting integration: Save time and avoid expensive mistakes 

By bringing all of these capabilities together in one place, brewery ERPs streamline management so you can worry less about the details and devote more energy to growing your business.

Instead of choosing a standalone brewery ERP, look for a point-of-sale (POS) system that has brewery management software built in. Having all of your transaction, customer, and inventory data in one place will make the brewery management system’s capabilities even more powerful.

How brewery management software improves profitability

The key to staying in business is making more money than you spend, but we know that’s easier said than done. 

Think of brewery management software as your profitability sidekick. Equipped with a complete brewery ERP-and-POS solution, you have what it takes to generate more revenue while saving time and money.

Specifically, a brewery management system can help you:

• Discover profitable opportunities
• Avoid inventory gaps and waste
• Focus labor costs on meaningful tasks
• Say goodbye to expensive mistakes
• Improve distribution and wholesale management
• Scale your business

Here’s how.

Discover profitable opportunities

Advanced reporting from brewery management software empowers you to identify opportunities for growth, and to find and fix problems.

Let’s say your brewery is introducing sours as limited-edition releases and you want to know if they should become permanent menu fixtures. By examining sales and production data from your brewery management system and POS after the first few weeks of sales, you might decide to brew your lambic sour year-round because it’s both popular and highly profitable, and reserve your gose for your summer menu because it’s a crowd-pleaser but costlier to make.

With access to inventory, production, and sales data from all of your venues in real time, you can reach the right business decisions faster.

Avoid inventory gaps and waste

There’s nothing worse to brewers than having to let yeast go to waste because you overestimated demand. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common problem, since bars and restaurants lose 23% of their inventory to waste. And to customers, there’s nothing worse than finding out the beer you were craving is sold out.

A brewery management system solves both of these dilemmas by tracking inventory in real time, across wholesale and retail outlets. It automatically updates your ingredients, beers, and merchandise as you go through them, whether they’re sitting on a shelf or in a tank, or traveling in a van. In other words, a brewery ERP ensures you always have something to sell and are never selling things you don’t have.

Focus labor costs on meaningful tasks

Your staff members are the heart and soul of your business, but they’re also one of your biggest expenses. Bars spend between 18% and 24% of their operating costs on labor. If you’re serving food, you’re probably spending closer to 31.6% on staff.

Brewery management software helps you make the most of your labor costs by automating tedious tasks, like counting inventory, which frees staff up to focus on things only humans can do, like engaging customers and making personalized recommendations. Spend your labor costs where they matter the most and let software take care of the rest.

Say goodbye to expensive mistakes

With brewery management software built into your POS you can say goodbye to spreadsheets and error-prone, manual processes, and hello to a complete solution that provides a holistic view of your brewery operations from tank to taproom. 

This tool simplifies reconciliation of taproom sales data with wholesale and other inventory activity by providing a clear view of depletion rates, margins, and taproom loss. 

Plus, accounting integrations automatically sync invoice and purchase order data to your bookkeeping solution, ensuring you’re paid on time and don’t have outstanding debts that could delay brewing.

Improve distribution and wholesale management

If your taproom isn’t the only place people can find your beer, then you deal with loads of logistics to distribute kegs and bottles. A brewery ERP lightens this load by streamlining fulfillment management. 
With delivery route planning and tracking, route optimization, proof of delivery, invoice generation, and note-taking features all in one system, you can spend less time on logistics and more time growing your beer empire.

Brewery management software: Your secret weapon for profitability

You didn’t get into the brewery business because you wanted to make beer no one would buy or because you love keeping track of how much yeast you have in your warehouse. We bet you got into this business because you’re passionate about crafting brews that excite customers and making every guest feel like family.

Brewery management software takes boring, tedious tasks off your plate so you can do more of what you love, while running a financially sustainable business. To successfully leverage all that a brewery ERP has to offer, look for one that’s part of a complete POS solution. Arryved Brewery Management, part of the Arryved POS System, is a seamless, streamlined, and simple solution that helps you track what’s happening in your tanks, on your trucks, and with your customers in one place. Request a demo today.